In a whale-sized post on his personal blog, Angel investor Jerry Neumann looks at the ad tech landscape and a summer's worth of M&A rumors. He sees an attitude from potential buyers that they don't need to buy - they think they can build. Neumann isn't so sure as he writes, "Companies can do very well at their core mission. But when their core mission is media or software or infrastructure or professional services, it's going to be really hard for them to get a foothold in the quickly changing adtech world. This never seems to be taken into account in build versus buy analyses: they can't build, and even if they could, they won't. And if they do, it will suck." Read more Neumann ruminations.

Providing The Client Metrics

It's every ad tech company's or agency's dream - a council of advisers plucked from the biggest brands in the land. Well, that's exactly what Facebook has! Sure, sure, no surprise. But look at Facebook's "upsell" strategy regarding a tentpole deal - metrics, as Ad Age's Cotton Delo writes, "The best example of a tentpole deal to date is with Diageo (a client council member), whose commitment is worth more than $10 million and promises 'to provide metrics to help Diageo define ROI and performance across its priority brands.'" How crazy is that? Facebook is providing success metrics? Ideally a third-party would be involved, but, it's Facebook. Read more about FB and big brands.

Geotargeting Fears

Massachussetts congressman Ed Markey says that he and his fellow congressman are none too pleased by Verizon's decision to allow advertisers the use of some first-party, customer geographic data for ad targeting. Read the release. ClickZ's Kate Kaye notes that a Verizon update sent to its customers appears to have set off the Washington D.C. alarms. Read more. One way or another, first-party data holders will be selling data as part of their terms with consumers. Data could be a new, important revenue stream for some.

Social And Display

Late last week, comScore announced a new product targeting the intersection of social media and display advertising with a tool it calls Ad Metrix Social. What's maybe just as interesting is the company's segementation of the social display space: socially-published ads vs. socially-enabled ads. Read the definitions. comScore does not want to be left out of the social conversation.

Lifting Offline With Online

Good news, Mr. Or Ms. Brand Marketer. Nielsen says that all this spending you're doing online, raising awareness, is a good thing. As an anonymous Nielsen author writes on the company blog, "There is emerging evidence that brand metrics – which show attitudinal response to online campaigns – can predict offline sales." Hey now. See the charts and graphs that claim to prove it. (source: Brand.net blog) Nielsen says in the final line of the post that CTR provides no direction on awareness or offline sales. Ouch. Poor CTR.

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan takes the soapbox on TechCrunch to offer his 9 reasons why video advertising has failed to grow as quickly as many thought. Coming in at #4 is a transparency - or a lack thereof. He writes, "While the definition of what is 'online video advertising' isn’t really an issue, the lack of transparency is, especially when it comes to differentiating between in-banner and in-stream inventory, disclosing it, and pricing it accordingly." Read more.

More DDS/Mediabank Thoughts

Consultant and former PHD IT exec Kevin Reynolds shares his thoughts on the merger between agency back offices systems suppliers MediaBank and Donovan Data Systems. He writes on his personal blog about integration challenges: "DDS is based on IBM 3270 mainframe technology with custom built application interfaces. (...) MediaBank, because of it’s legacy of acquisitions, has .Net, Unix, and Oracle tech stacks." Ach du lieber! Reynold's point - Mediabank CEO Bill Wise and DDS President Batson have their work cut out for them. Read more.

Content Saturation

How many How-To's can a company make? According to The Business Insider's Noah Davis, the need for writers may be slacking at how-to-maker and Demand Media property eHow as content appears to have hit a saturation level. Davis quotes from a Demand email sent to its legions of writers recently, "With our eHow.com library already so comprehensive, we saw the opportunity to shift our focus to more targeted categories and other forms of content such as slide shows, video series and feature articles." Though Demand CRO Joanna Bradford indicates that the need for writers remains, the email to writers is fairly clear. Read more.

Infographic Monday

What are the most "disruptive" companies in the business world? Business expert site Focus thinks it knows as it brings together data with some graphic design skills. See it now.